Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) v3 on AssetStore

Ok actually Makeshift I take that back, it's still not working. I mean, the textures are showing up correctly in their right spots in the Unity Terrain Texture slots, but for some reason the footstep manager still isn't picking up the textures at all. What settings do you have turned on in your LOD Manager as far as shader options.

Here are my options that I have turned on:

Use U4 terrain materials
RTP on terrain - first pass
RTP on terrain - far distance
RTP on terrain - mesh blending
d3d9
d3d11
UV blend
UV blend at distance only
Global color blend multiplicative
global normal map
water/wetness

That's all my settings in my shader. Let me know what yours are. I mainly want to figure out what is causing this not to work. It's buggin the crap out of me lol Thanks for your help.

 

Have you tried contacting the developer of the ufps thing? I'd figure they might know what to look for, and it might be worth digging about in the scripts yourself, that ways you'd have a better understanding of it, hopefully, for the future whatever script used this kind of method

 

Thanks for the suggestion lazy.......yeah after extensive testing it actually ended up being something in the footstep manager script itself and I had to reimport it and it fixed the problem. Definitely a headache of trial and error, but I guess it's working now so all is well. Thanks.

 

No, DX11 isn't required for POM/PM parallax effects to work. What can be also checked is issue of "big triangles". Whn part of terrain is completely flat Unity terrain engine produces large triangles there which ruins proper parallax viewing dir interpolation in shader (this is the issue of any parallax shader, not specifically RTP).

Tom

 

First of all - don't use materials in LOD manager ("Use U4 materials" checkbox need to be UNCHECKED) or your CPU usage will bring framerate to knees. Another things to consider - it all depends on target platform and hardware you're aiming. PM is always a lot faster than POM, so I'd recommend this shading level for you. Try to reduce number of features used to visually acceptable level, but it's always kind of compromise performance vs. quality.

Tom

 

I haven't analysed footstepmanager myself but you probably run into problem that when you don't use terrain material and the same time use more terrain tiles RTP need to make ussage of built in detail texture slots. They are used to store global maps then (as can be seen on your screenshot). I'd say it's only matter of configuration of UFPS to get corret results. I don't believe this plugin alanyse detail texture content but relies on detail coverage maps (controlmaps) which stay unaffected by RTP. The only problem might be you probably need to point out a texture that serve as "grass", "rock" to get right sound. It's only matter of remaping things to right texture slot. If your grass is on 1st layer and you see that this has been replaced by RTP with global colormap - tell UFPS that this texture is your "grass" and so on. First - save on disk textures produced by RTP so they can be referenced by other script somponents like UFPS.

Your other problem of terrain texture displayed wrong at distance - could you give a screenshot from editor view where larger terrain area is visible ?

Tom

 

I recently purchased RTP for use in addition to TerrainComposer. I am loading a blank project to begin learning the ins-and-outs of RTP, and have imported RTP only, with nothing else included. This is my console after import, is this normal?

 

Harmless for now. RTP3.1 will remove these messages due to new Undo functionality introduced in Unity 4.3

Tom

 

Got it. Thanks Tom

 

Hi Tom,

Thank you so much for your input and for the quick response! The target platform is PC, and the hardware I'm aiming for is mid-level to high-level. If you don't mind, I have two other questions

1 - In Terrain Composer I'm unable to see where I can configure RTP settings for a terrain. I expand Terrain and I do see the RTP menu option to the right of the Reset menu option, but when I click on RTP I don't see any settings. RTP menu option is also grayed out... Do you know why this is?

2 - Would it make any difference if I turned on Directx 11 in regards to RTP shader quality?

Thanks

 

I just found this out after ages puzzling over performance *facepalms*. In other news however, this means I can get to making a ton of fast terrain now and finally enjoy some proper terrain making and detailing, the beta's coming across very nicely!

 

1. Terrain Composer isn't meant to allow you selecting any RTP shader options. What this magic button does is assigning RTP script to all terrain tiles with proper global colormap. W/o this you would need to assign ReliefTerrain script component to all terrain tiles one by one. With 2-4 tiles it's no big deal, but with 256 (16x16) it is...

2. DX11 - will look exactly the same (RTP doesn't have - yet - DX11 tesellation features, but uses POM everywhere) but you can expect a bit better performance comparing to DX9.

ATB, Tom

 

One small thing i noticed that gives me a bunch of errors but are easy to fix:
There are lot of classes you have a bunch of Tools.current, you should rename them to UnityEditor.Tools.current instead to avoid clashes for users like me who has bad class names : p

 

Thanks for the tip, I'll introduce this.

Tom

 

Hey Tom, I'm getting this error when I try to build a project with v3.1

"Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/_Internal/ReliefTerrainGlobalSettingsHolder.cs(1452,25): error CS0103: The name `CheckAndUpdate' does not exist in the current context"

a total of 84 times between lines 545- 579 , 1434 - 1468 , 1789-1799 and 1800- 1288. Otherwise no problems. Love the new features. Thanks for including me in the beta!!!

 

Thanks, I've been reported about this build problem, I probably moved some part of code in #if UNITY_EDITOR section which makes it crash on build. I'll try to provide you with beta2 patch next week.

Tom

 

Is there a script or something to automate the reliefterrainvsgeometryblend script functions? I (and I'm sure many of us) would like to be able to multi-edit those fields for a bunch of objects that will work with similar settings. With 100's of similar objects in a scene it would be nice to have the ability to mass terrain blend stuff like rocks. Anyone found a way? Right now I'm just using larger than necessary statically combined meshes to blend just so I can do a bunch at a time, but it's really pushing the tri count.

 

Good point. I think It might be possible to make a tool that would automatiaclly assign blending script for multiple objects, then blend it near ground, flatten a bit tessellate and optimize (removing invisible tris below ground which is new option in RTP3.1). I'll try to implement such automater then.

Tom

 

That would be awesome, really streamline things. 3.1 beta is killer by the way. A great improvement on an already very impressive product. I messed with some sliders and compile options a bit yesterday, I'll try and build something today and post some shots for people. But it has to happen before the super bowl

 

Wow, Nathaniel just pointed out to me that you made it to the asset store frontpage! Congratulation! All that without artificial boosting with 24h deals, the quality of RTP really stands out and you deserve to be on the frontpage permanently in my opinion! Lets hope you'll stay there.

I really look forward to work on the demoscene again and finally finish that thing
Once RTP 3.1 comes out of Beta it will be without a doubt the best realtime terrain rendering solution, even beyond the realms of unity... and that even without fancy dx10/11 techniques. I am very happy about your increasing success on the asset store!

 

Hi,

when I create a terrain (using terrain composer) and apply RTP shaders, having "RTP on mesh" checked, it will render out the stones transparent. I guess that´s not how it´s supposed to be.
now when I turn the "RTP on mesh" feature off and recompile shaders, the stones will keep the relief shader.
and even if I delete all stones and generate them once again, they will still have the relief shader applied.

I can now select all stones and change the shader for all of them, but I wonder if it wouldn´t make sense to propagate the checking and unchecking of "RTP on mesh" to the generation process.

congratulations on asset store front page!

 

Hi, I encounter another problem with 3.1, when I add a global normal map, some areas of terrain
turn white:


I'm using default strength value (3)

I can reduce the problem by lowering strength value.

all was fine in previous version with this map/config.

About my problem in deferred rendering, I can't find a work around. I must set rendering path to forward otherwise almost all textures turn black. (tested on 2 computers)

 

That's intriguing. I'm wondering what stones rendered do you mean. "RTP on mesh" means RTP will compile shaders that can be used on arbitrary mesh (instead of build-in Unity's terrain dynamically generated one). So - you can provide RTP with globally uv mapped slice of terrain (0..1 x 0..1 uv coords - refer to example scene using this solution) with normals/tangents and this can look like Unity's terrain in terms of shading used. Could you explain you issue providing me with more info/screenshots ?

ATB, Tom

P.S. thanks - I didn't know I was on the front page (I assume in this mid sized boxes just below the main asset featured) for a moment. Oh man, this makes huge difference in sales for today... .

 

Global normalmap is applied different way now (more correct). Strength of 1-1.2 is fine in most cases when you haven't scaled your terrain height. You need to finetune it this way:
1. use "by distance" slider there.
2. set far distance (in perlin settings) to max
3. when you move "by distance" in global normalmap settings to max you'll see global map applied only at far distance, this means at close distance you see terrain reacting for light "normal way" using mesh normals.
4. Move "by distance" slider to zero to see how this close distance looks like with global normalmap applied everywhere ( also at close distance).
5. When you set "strength" slider to the right value you'll see no difference (in terms of overall light strength quality) when playing with "by distance" slider. The only difference will be more bumpmap shading details when globalnormalmap is applied ("by distance" slider set to zero for close distance while at far distance global normalmap is applied always using commanded strength).

The reason I've introduced strength slider is sometimes global normalmap doesn't fit real mesh shape y0u can export global normal texture from WM and then in Unity you can scale terrain height. In such case texture slopes won't follow the mesh you see.

The problem with black areas - does it occur in DX11 ? I've been reported about similar issues in DX11.

Tom

 

Hello all, Tomaszek was kind enough to give me access to the beta so I womped up this terrain this morning to give people a look at what is coming in 3.1, I was going to record a video but I ran out of time (lightmapping took too long). The scene stays at well over 100 real fps on my computer (not the editor mumbo-jumbo), and it is terribly un-optimized at this point (ie. no atlas for the rocks and full mesh colliders for the rocks instead of optimized, and all rocks are combined meshes over the whole terrain, just so I could use blending without having to do each rock, and it looks like we'll have a new tool for that soon!). From a base sculpt to world machine to unity this terrain took about four hours. The part that took the longest really was baking the maps for the colormap overlays, the hardest part was getting the lightmap to bake (that's cause I don't have a lot of experience with beast I guess). Everything was generated proceedurally in world machine based off a base sculpt, textures were created in photoshop and everything was placed with worldmachine masks in terrain composer. Foliage and rocks are placeholder assets, but with a bit of tweaking did a nice job. Without Terrain Composer this would have taken days, and not looked as nice I don't think. Without RTP it looks like ass. But with a little bit of hand placed love I'll be happy with it, and won't have spent forever doing it.

The coolest new feature IMHO is the IBL support, looks really cool with skyshop, but the list of new stuff goes on and on. Carving holes in the terrain and using meshblending is going to be a gamechanger as well for me. Truly independant UV blend layers is a gift, and the advanced color and height blending options really look like they are going to be cool, though I didn't play with them much. I'm using 8 Layers in one pass, plus snow, plus triplanar in addpass. I frankly ran out of time to experiment with other options, but this looks good to me.

Oh, and this is my first attempt at a full unity terrain, beyond just messing with things, so I expect the process to be faster and produce even better results in the future. It's a small environment (1km2), but my main goal is just testing out how far I can push the engine so that when a 64bit editor comes out I can start building the larger terrains necessary for what I'd like to do (get massive memory overruns in the 32bit editor when trying to detail a 300km2 area to the level of detail I'm looking for).

I was tempted to take a little more time on this, but I wanted to both show what is possible in a short amount of time with RTP, show off some 3.1 features, and make it to a superbowl party this afternoon. Future plans involve a river, a cave, and seashore, all elements that I want to make it into my final project. Feedback would be appreciated. If this doesn't belong here let me know and I'll take it down.

Thanks
(go Broncos)

 

ok I'll try that.
I'm using default dx9. I have the same problem on a gtx 780 and quadro fx 4800.
Maybe the best is to put my project on dropbox ?

@negativecap : do you use forward our deferred rendering. If it's forward, can you try to switch to deferred to see if you get the same problem than me?

 

Thank you for sharing.

Your terrain looks quite professional (really like the artistic level of terrain surface textures used), despite of a bit unlit trees (maybe making them just 2x darker would halp a bit with your lighting conditions). Have you tried new AFS shaders ?

You could also put your artwork here - a thread dedicated for RTP showcase.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/209328-Relief-Terrain-Pack-showcase-for-developers/page3

Good luck with your project, I'm looking forward to see more on this

ATB, Tom

 

Just grabbed Skyshop as it was half price, so'll be testing out your pbr terrain stuff soon I hope! TC has a lot of work to do but the terrain shaders are already beginning to shine

Performance wise, i've found NOT using U4 materials unless you really are only using a handful of terrains is a great way to get your performance up, otherwise, the quality of the terrain i'm getting with WC and using a global normal map is realy something else, even if you start increasing the pixel error significantly. Detail textures blend absolutely great. Mixed with the volcano things coming through and the fancy clouds, i think its got to that amazing time when one-man-shows of small teams really are getting great tools for great things

 

Just watched Skyshop's terrain tutorial video, but was wondering what the RTP3.1 + Skyshop workflow is like, since Skyshop seems to use its own shaders...

 

It's easy, use skyshops functionality to convert spherical environment maps to cubemaps and use them in RTP, the terrainshader from skyshop wont be used at all. RTP can do so much more than the skyshop shader so its an easy descision

 

Thanks for the reply, Becoming! Happen to have a video/screen of Skyshop lighting on a RTP terrain? Well, if you're in the beta

 

Yeah i have beta access but i am a bit too busy right now to get started on RTP 3.1 yet. I hope Tom and i can soon continue to work on the demoscene we started when RTP 3 came out. It will most probably showcase that feature too although baking the lighting into the emmisive colormap will give even better results. I am not sure yet which way to go, realtime IBL has some drawbacks compared to the baked IBL but its very much hyped and trendy, we will see. Personally i would always go for the baked IBL, at least for the diffuse component. The specularity on terrain is usually so weak that it visually does not matter if you use cubemaps or RTPs optimized reflections. As long there is something to reflect its looking good. But RTP can also use specular cubemaps if you want /need them.

So, sorry nothing to show yet but i can ensure you that RTP is capable to beat the Skyshop terrain results easily, it only depends on the artist working on it, though that counts for both skyshop terrain and RTP. Most important factor are the textures.

 

I mean the stones, that terrain composer creates - just happened while experimenting, not a big issue

-

another question (posted it at the terrain composer thread as well):

is there a way to use the RTP vertical texture for splatmapping inside terrain composer (or even for heightmap filtering, object placement etc.)?

 

@Botumys: Those screenshots are with deferred rendering. PM me for details.

 

If I don't run out of stamina/willpower i'll hopefully have several new things to showoff rtp/tc/fluidity/nuaj again overnight maybe, including using a skyshop cubemap and maybe chuck in something controllable to explore around, i dunno! I want to try out one of my models with a dDo/skyshop brushup if possible and put it in with all that fun stuff. Oh and I need to find some suitable trees. I think ive just given myself way too much to do

 

Do you tried 8 layers in 2 passes and deferred?

 

What are people using to create global normal maps? Is there a way to create a global normal map from a high-res Unity terrain?

 

There are a few ways:
You could export the terrain as an obj and use a 3d programm.
You can export the heightmap and use Worldmachine(or a 3d programm, but thats less convinient)
You can use terrain composer, my alltime high recommendation for making terrains anyway.

The last option will give you the most bang for the buck if you consider the other features of terrain composer, although worldmachine is also very nice to have if you are serious about making terrains. Best to have both imho.

 

I actually have TerrainComposer, but had no idea it could generate normal maps. Just found the tutorial video explaining where the export files are hiding. Awesome! I'm glad I asked.

 

I was very happy to see you could make normal maps and they DO make a big difference when it comes to inevitably cutting down pixel error and suchlike. Performance is becoming a pain at the moment to the point i've looked at 3rd parties for the most elementary culling of occluded terrain tiles. Its finicky knowing what will work best, larger terrains or smaller terrains but with worldcomposer where you're using the satelite image as at least a guide for your tree placement, it seems to point at higher terrain number terrain tiles but not getting the most information as you can over an areas with the heightmap (ive started to look at zooms of 13 or even 12) as they'll all be decimated anyways (Given the other heavy, but not irreplacable systems to me, ike nuaj i dont know how I could remotely get what i want without it

I'm back to trying 15x15 (100kmx100km)terrain grid and hoping a 3rd party occluson system can take care of problems there but the normal map output and RTP's implementation is a godsend

Ive noticed snow seems to be usuable in RTP3.1 in massive terrain mode but doesnt seem to actually do anything, ill keep trying on that because the wc captured snow isnt the best

 

Found it. Set Specular color alpha to zero in Settings main to fix the issue. Anyway I'll fix it in shader so specular color will take specular color alpha into account only for first pass (useful in presence of one pass when we'd like to have specular term intensity in alpha channel - some postFX use this I believe - this is how default Unity lighting functions work).

Tom

 

Good day Tomaszek.
Congratulations for the work . I am working on developing simulators for the Brazilian Army with VBS3 and Vegaprime . Unity is in test with dll to movements of helicopter platforms and is doing quite well, with quick responses . I bought the RTP V3.0 with my money because I believe in the potential of your project with WorldMachine , Terrain and World Composer. Also purchased with my own money because I like to support people who have excellent initiatives . I would like to inform you that your work is being very helpful in the guise of textures tiles . I wonder if the button " constuct colormap detail from colors of layers ( below ) " is in trouble on land tiles , because I am having to click on terrains tiles one by one . The button only works with the selected terrain , not all adjacent terrains like the other existing buttons and sliders on RTP . I am a beginner in your tool .

Sorry for my english .
Best Regards .
Major Noelio Heluy Ferreira - Brazilian Army

 

I could fire this procedure for all tiles in the scene. No problem. I'd introduce dialog box for user to confirm whether he want to build it for one tile or for all. Anyway - construction of global colormap this way is only very very basic method. I'd recommend to work more on these textures to add more detail there.

Tom

 

Hi Tom and Nathaniel,

First of all - congratulations to your products, I'm using them with WorldMachine and they are looking great! I'm eagerly looking forward to RTP3.1 as well!

Just wanted to report a very annoying issue I have just encountered and solved while fiddling around with Terrain Composer and RTP3, just to prevent other users to encounter it as well and prevent any negative reviews (I'm a publisher as well).

I dragged 4 splat textures that came with the Terrain Composer and RTP packages into Terrain Composer's splat-texture slots. At that time I did not notice that although the diffuse textures were all 512x512, their corresponding displacement-textures were 512 at TerrainComposer's and 256 at RTP's sample textures.
It wouldn't have been such a problem if it failed right away, but I was "lucky" at first: the smaller dispplacement-texture was at the first slot, leading to no error when the textures were atlassed by RTP. I noticed earlier that the parallax-mapping seemed odd at some places, but thought that maybe I had made some bad shader settings and didn't care much at that stage, since it was looking great most of the time.
Later, when I played around with some parameters and have switched the order of the splat textures, so that now the larger displacement texture was at the first slot. In the meantime I was tweaking some RTP parameters and playing with water maps, etc, and suddenly whenever I hit "Set All" or saved the scene, it raised an "Array index is out of range" exception. The problem was that I was mislead since I thought that maybe now I was using too many or too few texture layers, not that the textures itself were the problem (since with the other texture order it worked, at least it raised no error).
When I hit "Refresh" in Terrain composer, everything looked fine (must have been loaded from a previous state), but after hitting save, an auto-reload ruined the terrain again. As a solution I deleted the whole terrain and start from a new blank scene again, since I thought that one of my actions must have corrupted the terrain, but I failed to undo the error once it got into my setup - left me quite frustrated.

Maybe you could add a warning when textures are of different size:
- in RTP: throw a more descriptive Exception when the rtp_functions.CombineHeights method is called with invalid textures, would be 3 lines of code - including braces .
- in Terrain Composer: display a red error-message text label below the texture slots.

I know it's my fault of improperly using your tools, but i think it would be worth the effort.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Kind regards,
Harald

 

Thanks, its work !

Ps: I know it's not due to rtp, but in terrain composer under "splat texture/RTP" , the "magic button" to assign global color map work well, but there is no more "magic" button to assign normal maps.

ps2: the rtp notification window still appear even is I click on "don't bother me again".

 

Hi Tom,

I found a really strange problem with the latest RTP version that I haven't encountered in other version. I applied a single test texture on the terrain with height + normal map, but when I change the position of my first person controller camera I am getting very different extrusion on the terrain. I attached two screenshots taken from positions only a couple of meters apart. There shouldn't be any major difference in the extrusion, but nonetheless I get pretty significant stretching at one position but clearly less at the other. How can I solve this problem? Is this a bug or did I do something wrong?

Thanks!

Sean

 

You could ask Nathaniel for adding more integration as soon as RTP3.1 is out I guess (but I don't mean to bother him with additional work he might not want to do )

This notification cancellation should be valid only per scene session. Anyway - it's important to save textures to not get all these "Splat X null" messages and missing references when you're back to your project. Is there any reason you don't save ? It's only 1 texture for tiles when you don't use water. For modified gloal coloramps you need to save them back after modifications (painting or cutting holes in terrain).

Tom

 

In fact it's not due to RTP version. It's not even problem of RTP at all . It's problem of all paralax shaders that rely on interpolated viewing direction. I'm pretty sure your terrain consists of very large triangles in its dynamic mesh. Try to reduce them (make terrain just a very tiny bit wavy at problematic areas if possible to resolve this). This issue is described in RTP pdf docs troubleshooting section.

Tom

 

Can't find it in the troubleshooting section. Which one is it exactely?

I just checked in wireframe view and indeed the triangles of my terrain are pretty large. It's a complete flat terrain and for most areas I won't be able to change that.
Any other way to force the triangles to become smaller?

 

Botumys, i had it shown to me what to do to fix that issue (TC's incorporation with RTP has broke some things I think with 3.1), i'll get in contact with the fix